IN THE NEWS
After reading Robert Farley's reaction to the movie United 93, I'm even less inclined to see it than I already was. A technically proficient depiction of events I've replayed in my head, over and over again, for the last five years probably won't help me glean any new insight into the 9/11 attacks.
It doesn't help that I knew Todd Beamer in passing. He and I worked at the same company, and we had occasion to collaborate on a couple of projects. (I was helping him craft a sales pitch to potential customers of the software we were developing.) As was the case with many people watching the 9/11 attacks as they unfolded, at least one person I knew died in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or an empty field in Pennsylvania. Do I need to relive Todd Beamer's death?
I'm no wimp when it comes to watching fairly depressing movies and TV shows. In the last couple of weeks, I've watched documentaries about mental illness in American prisons, the imprisonment of American GIs in a Nazi labor camp, and the Chinese government's campaign to erase the Tiananmen massacre from public memory. My DVD collection contains such light-hearted fare as Glory, in which all the major characters die at the end.
However, I'm just not interested in replaying the 9/11 attacks, for the sheer sake of admiring someone's skill at doing so. I'm more keen on seeing Americans get a more realistic perspective on 9/11, not as the "day everything changed," but as "the day some Al Qaeda terrorists got unspeakably lucky," or maybe, "the day Americans woke up to a threat that was already there." I'm not sure if United 93 helps or hurts that effort.
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